Axis range for Charts in Numbersl

Your problem is that your X values are not in a header column.

Numbers uses the header column to determine the axis range. Your table has X values in column D, but column A is your header column, and it's column A that's its basing the axis on.

Move your data left so that the X values are in a header column and you should be good to go:

That isn't an absolute requirement - you can override the setting to use whatever range you want, but if you want Numbers to do it automatically, then header columns are your key.

> Why is my chart supposed to be the chart on the lower left and not the x/y scatter chart?

In general, scatter plots are best used to compare non-linear, discrete data.. maybe you're a runner and you want to compare your race time to the ambient temperature so you can see if there's a correlation between your pace and the weather, or maybe you're an investor looking for stock picks and want to visualize various companies' earning vs. their employee count (or any other metric that interests you)

In these cases, any single data point is unconnected to others e.g. Company A's earnings/employees is not directly connected to Company B's earnings/employees, but you might see a pattern, or find the outliers that are high (or low) value investments.

In these. charts you can look at the overall to see patterns, but the space between the values is irrelevant.

Line charts, on the other hand, generally show connected or linear data. Like your x -> sin(x), there is a direct linear progression, and the view can infer values of sin(x) from looking at the graph, even if there isn't a direct data point for the x value in question.

> how am I supposed to format the number of subdivisions of the major & minor X & Y axis lines?

If you select the table itself (not a data series), you should have options in the Inspector -> Axis

For the Y axis you can override the Min and Max values, as well as define how many major/minor steps to break the chart into. Further down you can choose the line weight and color for the major and minor lines:

If you switch to the X axis you can choose how many of the X-axis categories should be shown, and the format of the gridlines between them.

> What chart type are you selecting? The one in the last row of graphs with two plot lines or the X/Y scatter graph with data points as x marks?

I created mine with a simple line chart

In my mind, scatterplots are better for distributed, non-linear, 2-dimensional data, but x->sin(x) is inherently linear